Tab for access: How New York City is increasing participation and access to government contracts

Each year, New York City spends over $30 billion a year on public contracts to deliver essential good and services to its eight million residents. This is an enormous amount of spending, more than most U.S. states or indeed many countries. But until recently, like many governments, New York City relied on antiquated systems and lacked the tools to take full advantage of its procurement data. 

The team at the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services (MOCS) have a vision for a more open, transparent and inclusive procurement process. MOCS has dedicated a lot of time and effort into achieving this goal, and we’re excited to see their efforts begin to pay off. For example, over the last several years, the City has transitioned to PASSPort, an end-to-end online procurement system that creates additional transparency and efficiencies in the procurement process. 

We sat down with City Chief Procurement Officer and MOCS Director Lisa Flores, to learn more about their work. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

MOCS aims to promote the values of equity, diversity and access. Please tell us more about how you developed these values, and how they manifest through your work?

We started off thinking about the barriers to entry for New Yorkers, who, in many cases, are people of color and/or small businesses. This focus was foundational for creating our mission, vision, and values. 

The goal of creating an equitable procurement system for New York means that we have to look at things in a multifaceted way to really achieve impact. We’ve had to peel back the onion of decades of rules and regulations that have built up and made it very difficult for people to do business with the city. We’re thinking about how to leverage technology to create more access to procurement opportunities. For example, during this administration, we went live with a tool called PASSPort Public that brings all of our procurement data into the open so that vendors and prospective vendors can better understand the City’s contracting activity. 

The other part of it is people. People are central to a healthy procurement environment. At the end of the day, the individuals receiving the goods and services, like getting their trash picked up or child care, are New Yorkers. It’s important for us to be accountable to them and understand they are the end user and beneficiary of our procurement. 

We’ve also completely transformed how we think about engaging with contractors and potential contractors. We’re conducting trainings and getting out into neighborhoods and meeting vendors where they are through programs like MOCS In Your Neighborhood where we address hands on issues such as: How do you get into PASSPort? How do you find opportunities? And how do you successfully bid on those opportunities? Through our Getting Started webinars we’ve trained 15,000 participants. And on social media we’ve launched our successful #DidYouKnow series on some of the key questions we get. 

Ultimately, we have seen that the system has been broken for many years. What we want to change is that we want to demystify public procurement, take the curtain back and show that everyone can access it if they want to. The work I described above is all chipping away at that goal.

What is the role of transparency in your approach? 

I previously worked at the Comptroller’s office for eight years, and I’ve been in procurement for many years of my public service career. What we thought about when I came into MOCS was transparency by default, and understanding that we are accountable to taxpayers. Part of being accountable to taxpayers is putting the good, the bad and the ugly about our data out into the public sphere. This helps us build trust with our citizens so that they know we’re not trying to hide anything, and understand that not everything is perfect. It offers the opportunity for good government groups and others to mine our data in new ways, and provide us with feedback that hopefully helps the procurement system. 

One example is that you can now see where a contract is in the procurement process on PASSPort Public, our public-facing procurement data platform launched in 2022. Looking at this data has been enlightening for us internally and externally, and helped us understand places that are taking quite a long time for us to get to the end of the procurement process. These insights have helped us engage in conversations with different sectors and even city council members and others that regulate around procurement at the City of New York. I’m hoping that we can continue to expand PASSPort Public and its tools, and continue to partner with all the people who use our services.

If you could change one misconception people have about public procurement, what would it be?

I think a big misconception about public procurement is that it’s this very obscure, bureaucratic paper pushing exercise that lives in the bowels of government, with folks just pushing paper from one place to another with the intent of doing nothing else but making your life difficult. 

There can be nothing further than the truth. Because of the amount of dollars that we spend, and individuals that we touch with the services that we provide, people in procurement actually have the opportunity to be engines of innovation. We can lead in technology and approaches to programs. Public procurement can be an economic engine for any municipality.

The people who make procurement decisions have a huge amount of influence, so I’m also really looking forward to strengthening the workforce pipeline into procurement. In New York City, we have a high percentage of young people and people of color who are not seeing this as a pathway for themselves, and there’s all different kinds of entry points to impact in procurement. I’m hoping that what we see is folks sitting at the table, making decisions that impact the communities in which they live, and that match their experiences and background. We can bring that passion to public procurement.